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Motherhood in Times of War: Breastfeeding Practices and the Representation of Ottoman Women in Advice Literature (1911-1918)
Abstract
This paper explores the regulation of breastfeeding practices for new mothers in advice literature published in the Ottoman newspapers, booklets, and medical magazines between 1911 and 1918. In a period marked by military conflict, the female body and its reproductive role - even after pregnancy -repeatedly appeared in the advice literature of the era. In these texts, breastfeeding practices and the notion of motherhood were reframed as important moral and national duties. This phenomenon was the result of the cultural, moral, and political reconstruction of the "natural woman" through the state's ideological interventions during the early twentieth century. I argue that the medicalization of breastfeeding and the promotion of the "natural woman" in the form of a mother led to the reinforcement of essentialist dispositions on the Ottoman women that shaped new and restrictive subject positions for them in Ottoman society, aligned with the general ideological climate of the time. For my analysis of breastfeeding and the representation of Ottoman women as mothers, I refer to Avanzade Mehmed Süleyman's book titled "Is it a Boy or a Girl?", published in 1914, and to the article series titled "How Should Children be Fed?" by an Armenian doctor who used his nickname, Lokman Hekim, in an Ottoman-Armenian medical journal called Doctor, published in 1913-14. The contents of these two bodies of knowledge written in Ottoman Turkish and Armenian show that the male authors of these texts aimed at not only regulating the breastfeeding schedule and bodily care for young mothers, but also, they targeted new mothers' everyday lives, interactions with their family members, and their sexual responsibilities to their husbands. These interventions in Ottoman women's daily life and physical bodies led to the woman's becoming an object of public concern and the management of male experts. By providing a close reading of these texts, this paper analyzes how the medical reframing of breastfeeding and child-rearing as "scientific facts" turned women's bodies into sites of intervention by men and how it overlaps with the discourses surrounding motherhood and women's sexuality in the early twentieth century.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Anatolia
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries